Gunmetal Magic (37 page)

The four figures attacked the serpent, chopping at him with strange curved swords and poking him with spears. The serpent flailed, knocking them aside, and biting at their bodies. Finally the picture-Anubis turned into a huge jackal and bit Apep’s neck, clamping it down. The three other figures rushed him. The snake convulsed, knocking aside everyone except for Bast. The nimble cat jumped over the flailing body and stabbed the serpent in the heart.

“So why do the myths say that Ra killed him?” Roman said.

“Because priests were men and we can’t have the big enemy getting killed by a girl, can we now?” Anapa winked at me. “Holy texts are written by committee, and Ra had more priests. His cult was stronger. He is the sun, the life-giver, while Bast was only the protector of Lower Egypt. She used to be a lioness. Very fierce. By the time the priests were done with her, she’d turned into a domestic kitty cat. Took them a thousand years or so, but they crippled the lion.”

A bright flash of light exploded from Apep’s body, knocking the four figures down.

“Look at us, all knocked out.” Anapa smiled. “Lots of magic is released when you kill a god. Look at me there. See, I only have one fang? It broke off in the snake’s neck. Took me two days to grow a new one.”

The light faded. The four gods still lay prone on the ground. Little figures swarmed Apep, chopping his body to pieces.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Saii. His priests. They’re trying to save parts of him. That one took a scale. And this one got a vertebrae.”

“Those four are eating the corpse.” Raphael pointed at the four figures on all fours biting Apep’s side.

“They are devouring his flesh, so it will live through them. Nasty business.”

The final person pried Anubis’s fang from Apep’s dead body and the figures ran away.

“Of course, we chased them, but they were crafty,” Anapa
said. “They scattered to the four winds, hoping to eventually reunite and resurrect their god.” Anapa clapped his hands. The mural faded. “And that brings us to our current calamity, gentlemen and the lady, of course.”

The god smiled and pointed at Raphael. “You cost me my fang. It was dipped in metal and made to look like a knife, but inside it’s still my tooth with the blood of Apep in it. It was in the vault of that damned ruin and you had to buy it out from under me.” He turned to Roman. “You lost the staff carved from the vertebrae of Apep and his rib. They hid it in a room full of magical artifacts, so their magic would mask its location from me. You found it, took it out, and instead of taking it someplace safe, you practically served it back to them on a silver platter. Your own holy relic. Here is your award for stupidity. Congratulations.”

Roman opened his mouth and clamped it shut.

Anapa turned to me. “And you helped them both, stuck your nose where it didn’t belong, set the other furballs on me, and made my life difficult all around. I can’t move around the city, because there are two of your kind following me like a tail follows a dog. And half of the time, one of them is a cat. Do you have any idea how much I despise cats?”

Anapa took a long, calming breath. “Right now, Apep’s cult has the staff, the fang, and likely at least a few descendants of the Saii, the four priests who engaged in that creative gastronomy. So the question is, what are we going to do about it?”

“What happens if Apep is resurrected?” Raphael asked.

“Well, let us review.” Anapa leaned back. “He is the god of darkness, chaos, and evil. Let us agree to put aside philosophical concepts of evil and good, as they are subjective. What is evil for one is good for another. Let’s talk instead about chaos. Chaos, as our priest here will tell you, is an extremely powerful force. Do any of you know what a fractal is?”

Roman raised his hand.

Anapa grimaced. “I know you know. Here.”

A dark equilateral triangle ignited on the floor.

Anapa waved his hand. A smaller equilateral triangle appeared in the middle of the darker one, its corners touching the sides of the original triangle.

“How many triangles?” Anapa asked.

“Five,” I said. “Three dark, one light in the middle, and the big one.”

“Again,” Anapa said.

A smaller light triangle appeared in the middle of each dark triangle.

“Again. Again. Again.”

He stopped, pointing at the filigree of triangles on the floor. “I could go on to infinity. In basic terms, a fractal is a system that doesn’t become simpler when analyzed on smaller and smaller levels. Keep that in your head.”

A system that can’t be broken down to basic components. Okay, got it.

Anapa leaned forward. “To understand chaos, you have to understand mathematics. A lot of your civilization—most of any civilization, really—is built on mathematical analysis, the guiding principle of which is that everything can be explained and understood, if you just break it into small enough chunks. In other words, everything has an end. If you dig deep enough into any complex system, you will eventually unearth its simplest parts, which can’t be broken down any further. That sort of thinking works for a great many things, but not all of them. For example, the fractal. It doesn’t end.”

I felt like I was back in the Order’s Academy at some lecture. “This is surreal.”

“The fractal?” Anapa asked.

“You. Explaining this.”

Anapa gave a long-suffering sigh. “What do you know about me?”

And now I’d been singled out of the class. “You are the deity of funeral rites.”

“And what else?”

Umm…

“Medicine. The exploration of biology and metaphysics.
Knowledge. This is my primary function. I impart knowledge. I teach. One can’t just give man fire. It’s like giving a toddler a box of matches—he will burn the house down. You must teach him how to use it.” Anapa shook his head. “Back to the fractal. It can’t be explained by mathematical analysis, so humanity, as it so often does, declared it to be a mathematical curiosity and swept it under the rug. Except the fractal occurs again and again.”

An earthworm appeared on the floor of the office.

“A line,” Anapa said. “So simple.”

He sliced the air with his finger. The earthworm divided in two. Two became four, four became eight, eight became sixteen, more and more. A swarm of worms roiled and writhed on the floor.

Anapa pondered the knot of bodies. “Left to its own devices, nature defaults to a fractal. A human settlement is a fractal. It is a complex system with randomly interacting components that is adaptive on every level. The pattern of the evolution of a single cell to complex organism is a fractal. The way man approaches his quest for knowledge is a fractal. Think of it: biology, the study of living things. A simple concept.”

A straight line appeared on the floor.

“As man accumulates knowledge, the volume of information becomes too much. He feels the need to subdivide it.”

The line split into three branches marked with labels: zoology, botany, anatomy, then split again. Botany grew horticulture, forestry, plant morphology, plant systematics. Zoology splintered into zoological morphology and systematics, then into comparative anatomy, systematics, animal physiology, behavioral ecology…It kept building and building, splitting, growing, branching, too fast, too much, overwhelming…

“Make it stop.” I didn’t even realize I said it, until I heard my mouth produce the words.

The line disappeared.

“And that’s the crux of our problem,” Anapa said, his voice contemplative. “Man can’t handle the chaos. Oh, you can understand it in abstract, as long as you don’t think about it too hard. But at the core of it, whenever humans come against chaos, they deal with it in one of three ways. They hide from it, pretending
it isn’t there. They dress it up in pretty clothes. The God of the Hebrews is a fractal. He can do anything, he knows everything, he is infinite in his power and complexity. He is a fractal, so humanity felt the need to compartmentalize him. They don’t tackle the concept head-on. They tiptoe around it by telling little fables and anecdotes about their deity, and then when push came to shove, they invented a new aspect of him, his son, who comes with a more narrow, definitive message of infinite love.”

Anapa fell silent.

“You said there were three ways,” Raphael said.

“I did, didn’t I? Faced with chaos you will either ignore it, dance around it, or you will go mad. Apep is chaos. He is a primal expression of a fundamental principle, a fractal, a force rather than a deity. The priests of Egypt worshipped against him just to keep him at bay.”

“How do you worship against something?” Raphael asked.

“Let me tell you: once a year they got together, made a fake Apep, threw a big party, and burned him with great ceremony. There are actual rules for how to properly defile him. First, we spit on Apep. Then we stomp on him with our left foot. Then we use a lance to stab Apep, and so on. Do you see how they attempted to impose order upon chaos through a complex ritual?”

Anapa leaned forward. “If let loose, Apep will drive humanity insane. You will devolve into primeval barbarism where nothing exists except his worship in its most rudimentary form. You will abandon reason and logic and feed yourselves to him by the thousands like the idiots you are.”

The shadow outline of a jackal’s head flared around Anapa’s head. His dark lips trembled, betraying a glimpse of his fangs. “So you see, I have a vested interest in this venture. In the presence of Apep, no other god can exist. I want to prevent his resurrection, and if he manages to resurrect, I have to murder him again. And the three of you will help me.”

Silence descended. My mind struggled to get a grip. Too much information to process. “If Apep is so terrible, why do they want to resurrect him?”

“Because they are outcasts,” Anapa said. “They are unlike others. They grow snake fangs in their mouths, they have jaws that open too wide, and they know that others are repulsed by it. They seek to belong. They want to know where they came
from and they want to take pride in who they are. They probably think Apep will protect them and he will. It’s just the rest of humanity that will be on his menu.”

“I want the staff,” Roman said suddenly.

“Mmm?” Anapa looked at him.

“I want the staff,” the black volhv repeated. “If I do this, you will not harm me and will give me the Bone Staff to take back to my people.”

“Fine.” Anapa waved his hand.

I stared at Roman. “What are you doing?”

“I’m imposing order on a fractal,” Roman said. “If I define the terms of the bargain, he’s bound by them. He can’t do anything else to me.”

Anapa leaned back and laughed.

Raphael stepped forward. His face was grim and I saw determination in the set of his jaw.
Uh-oh.

“You have a problem with me over the knife. Why didn’t you just ask for the knife?” Raphael said.

“Because the less you knew about this mess, the better,” Anapa said. “Given half a chance, humans will screw things up, as the three of you have so deftly proven.”

“So you deliberately kept me in the dark, and now you want to blame me for my ignorance? That isn’t fair.”

Anapa’s gaze fixed on him. “I am a god. I don’t do fair.”

Raphael met it. “You have a problem with me, fine. Leave her out of this. She didn’t do anything to you.”

“No,” Anapa said.

Oh, Raphael. Why would you think I would stand for that?

“If you want my help, let her off the hook.” Raphael growled.

Anapa shook his head. “No.”

“Why?”

The ghostly jackal head appeared around Anubis. “Who are you to question me?”

Raphael’s lips trembled, betraying a flash of his teeth. “She goes free with no obligation to participate in your scheme. That’s my price.”

“Rejected.”

They stared at each other. Muscles tensed on Raphael’s frame. I smelled a brawl.

A third of me wanted to rip Raphael’s head off for the insult. I was perfectly capable of holding my own. I didn’t need his help to extricate me, nor did I need his grand sacrifice. Another third was all bursting at the seams with happiness: when facing a god, his first thought wasn’t about saving himself but about keeping me safe. He was willing to fight a god of chaos to keep me out of this mess. The final third of me just howled in blind terror, terrified for my safety, and even more terrified for the idiot bouda who was trying to buy my life with his.

And that was my relationship with Raphael in a nutshell: too complicated.

If I didn’t do something, the fool would throw himself away. In my head I saw Raphael buried under a pile of snakes. It was like a dagger straight in the heart.

No. No-no-no. Not happening.

I cleared my throat. “Girls, girls, you’re both lovely. I appreciate the sentiment, I do. But I will make my own decisions and the two of you will kindly get the hell out of my way.”

Raphael looked like he wanted to bite something. A self-satisfied smirk played on Anapa’s lips. I didn’t like it. Not one little bit.

“Counteroffer,” I said. “You take me, let Raphael go.” No need for both of us to get killed.

“Denied,” the god said. “This is getting tiresome.”